Electronic Book Review - wildehttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/wilde
enOf Graphomania, Confession, and the Writing Selfhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/graphomaniac
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Todd Napolitano</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">At the time of its publication in 1996, this essay caused quite a stir in the greater online community, with an essay by <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/reply.html">Diane Patterson</a> at the fore. At stake was the association of online journals and “women’s writing.” The links to the journals mentioned are no longer active. For a contemporaneous essay on Web journals, see Greg Dyer’s <a class="internal" href="/writingpostfeminism/illicit">Stealing Glances</a>, or Rob Wittig’s <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/serial">Justin Hall and the Birth of the Blogs</a> for a more recent look at “blogs,” Eds.</span> ]</p>
<p>Anyone venturing to explore a genre as vast as women’s writing on the Web is bound to feel a bit overwhelmed by the innumerable number of people calling themselves “writers.” Milan Kundera’s words readily come to mind here. “According to my calculations,” writes Kundera, “there are two or three fictional characters baptized on earth every second.” For years, I felt Kundera’s estimate to be rather exaggerated, flash-in-the-pan “creative writers” not withstanding. Until recently, that is. For as I think about his project on women’s writing on the net, I can’t help wondering if Kundera’s estimate isn’t somewhat <span class="lightEmphasis">understated</span>.</p>
<p>I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic here. In fact, I very much relish the idea that all net identities are fictional characters of sorts - isn’t this the creative allure of virtual reality, to become-beyond-oneself in an endless “web” of information, identities, and virtual bodies, to experience a radically new <span class="foreignWord">aporia</span> with one’s mundane, this-worldly existence. The ironic juxtaposition of “virtual” reality and the “real” - this was the power of transgression that once attracted me to the Net. A new moment of aesthetic emergence [ <span class="foreignWord">entstehung</span> ], the moment of arising as Nietzsche puts it. Indeed, what is so important here is that Nietzsche <span class="lightEmphasis">always writes to efface himself</span>. The Net, I thought - the ironic play of identities, an electronic masquerade, writing to unwrite oneself.</p>
<p>Ah, I am quite the fool. Having spent hours over the past three or four years reading through just some of the thousands of so-called “writers” publishing themselves electronically, I now completely empathize with Kundera when he claims, “I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists.” Unfortunately, Kundera’s Kierkegaardian moments of self-doubt remain the exception rather than the rule. Now, I certainly do not wish to squelch creativity (I am not quite as abject as Adorno in this regard), and I by no means want to dismiss women’s writing <span class="foreignWord">per se</span>. Quite the contrary, I am an advocate. What I am lamenting is how anyone with a computer and access to the Net fancies themselves a writer who simply must be read. Like an assembly of crazed narrators from a Poe anthology, this new generation of hacks simply grab you by the shirt collar and refuse to let go until their story has been told.</p>
<p>Kundera has the perfect term for this sort of writing - Graphomania. As Kundera describes it, graphomania is not “the mania to create a form,” that is, not a mania to create challenging new aesthetic forms and media, but rather a mania “to impose one’s self on others” through already established modes of “received ideas” and pervasive non-thought [ <span class="foreignWord">idées reçues</span> ]. Graphomania reflects a singular neurosis common to modernity: namely, the need to have an audience, “a public audience of unknown readers.” Graphomaniacs aspire to make stories out of their lives and thus presume to do a lot of people good. Writing four love letters a day is not graphomania; xeroxing your love letters so that they may be published one day is. In other words, it is true we cannot do without feelings. But I think Kundera puts it best when he says that “the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening.”</p>
<p>Frankly, I find many on-line journals frightening, all the more so because graphomania is not just an isolated phenomenon; no, it is a <span class="lightEmphasis">cultural ethos and a morality</span>, and it is not restricted to writing <span class="foreignWord">per se</span>. On the contrary, it pervades the very fabric of our every-day relations with others.</p>
<p></p><center>“That’s just like me, I….”</center>
<p>We may see graphomania as the overpowering conflation of the will to truth, the will to power, and ressentiment.</p>
<p>The on-line personal journal - at its worst, a new outlet for personal refuge we would otherwise find inane, petty, and grotesquely self-indulgent - is a perfect case in point. For here we have graphomania masquerading as the journal, that progressive, alternative women’s medium which has fortuitously found voice in academe. Certainly, journals are an empowering medium in the history of women’s writing, given the patriarchal politics underpinning the aesthetic realm. As such, their artistic and political import cannot and should not be overlooked. But too many on-line journals, while purporting to have a place within the larger tradition of women’s journal writing, are in actuality merely the same old blather recycled in the guise of the “new” and politically correct.</p>
<p>These journals include Carolyn Burke’s Diary, Jessa’s Journal, Willa’s Journal, Mary Anne’s “An Ongoing, Erratic Diary,” Laura’s Warm Puppy Diary,” Sabina’s Old Diaries. The list goes on.</p>
<p>From what I can tell, the gnomic injunction of your average on-line journal is two-fold and interpellative: Confess, and be true to your Self (understood here as something essential and virtuous). “Who one is,” to borrow Foucault’s once sardonic and ironic phrase, is made impervious to the cancerous threat of the fictive which is so much a part of the writing (and written) self. The on-line journals I read are not writing; they are graphomaniacal confessions which are quite blind to their own insight (ironic considering the self-reflective nature of the genre).</p>
<p>Case in point: “Coffee Shakes” by Sage A. Lunsford. Filled with nightmares, parental warfare, and Prozac, “Coffee Shakes,” like many on- line journals I have read, is overburdened with “ache” and “anger”, “veggie burgers”, politically incorrect neighbors, and the overblown environment of “feeling unaccountably terrible.” Amidst all the feeling “bone-crushingly sad” - pathos above all else - readers are told that the cat was fed wet food, sanitary pads were purchased as a fortuitous afterthought, and pop culture just sucks (compared to truly <span class="foreignWord">avant-garde</span> phenomena such as <span class="emphasis">X Files</span>, used book stores, and Ruth Rendel novels). Life is simple in this neck of the Net. Racism is bad and “pop-psych” radio shows are good. Wal-Mart, MTV, and America On-Line are “Blech”; purging personal “monsters” is healing.</p>
<p>Such is “Coffee Shakes” And as I mentioned above, it is symptomatic of the poor quality characterizing on-line journals in general. Clearly, a preponderance of these diarists are searching for a sense of connectedness with others. There is a strong urge here to confess with an odd sense of arrogance about having been bad, or beaten, or unloved. But there is also a deep need for compassion and understanding which is quite poignant. And so the guilt readers feel, coupled with their own senses of alienation and disconnectedness, keeps them clicking the page, so to speak. With each page, one moves further into the quagmire of graphomania with its overblown environment of sentimental gestures.</p>
<p>The computer is such an impersonal medium, however, that the desire to “connect” with others will always fall short. A fine journal would ironize this. Instead, we usually get the sort of self-aggrandizing myopia that fills “Coffee Shakes.” “But then, Todd and I are quite anti-social (Sarah and Todd and I like to say that we enjoy each other’s company precisely <span class="lightEmphasis">because</span> we’re all anti-social and enjoy our time alone and Sarah’s really the only person we hang out with outside the computer).” Alienation and “anti-social” feelings become as marketable a commodity as anything pandered by Wal-Mart or MTV.</p>
<p>Aside from the co-option of this otherwise historically important women’s medium, what concerns me most is the penchant these diarists have for essentializing their otherwise psychologically nihilistic identities. They do indeed constitute, in Kundera’s definition of graphomania, “a brute revolt against brute force, an attempt to free one’s ear from bondage, a frontal attack the objective of which is to occupy the enemy’s ear.” In the process - and this is the fundamental characteristic of confession - all political nuance is lost as are the subtleties of writing fiction (which, like it or not, is all we ever write when we write about ourselves).</p>
<p>In retrospect, I suppose that I shouldn’t have expected so much. After all, the computer is the most efficient, industrious, and productive creation our society has spawned. When the dust settles, when this most recent technological tumult finally quiets, I suspect we will remain one-dimensional all the same. Marcuse was so right. What seemed like great progress will prove to be stagnation, nonetheless, with the notable exception of the NASDAQ, which soared to new heights, making fantasies come true for daring high-tech investors, not adventurous Net surfers. One person’s artistic dream is another’s dividend, I suppose.</p>
<p>The ironies abound considering that sending identity adrift through the medium of writing, what Oscar Wilde might call the fine art of “lying,” seems to be increasingly intolerable among site masters these days, <span class="lightEmphasis">fiction</span> having given way to the ethical imperative that one must always present oneself to be who one “really” is. Above all, no lying! (Of course, recent government regulations will now ensure that we do not represent ourselves as more <span class="lightEmphasis">depraved</span> than good Americans should be. Is this Big Brother or a reflection of ourselves?). Indeed, the tensions of writing about human existence, the ironies of trying to write what is always ever ahead of language, are lost - the mortification of the question (Blanchot). And if it is merely superficial and trite to demand sources and continuities, centers and consistencies amidst the infinities of the net, we can say the very same about the <span class="lightEmphasis">writing self</span>, the written self. Yet amidst the growing marketplace of technological flights of fancy daring us to go where no one has gone before, one thing seems to be missing, namely <span class="lightEmphasis">writing</span>, that is, writing which, with the sweeping gesture of the fictive, allows the writing self to continually form anew.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I have found that too many on-line journals - women’s or otherwise - are simply another cog in the mode of mainstream, normative, socio-cultural identity production. What we have, then, is kitsch, albeit something far more than just <span class="foreignWord">l’art pacotilliste</span>, far more than just junk art. What we have is a facet of an overwhelming socio-cultural <span class="foreignWord">ethos</span>, a life-force and a spirit even (we can speak of the <span class="foreignWord">Kitschmensch</span> and the Kitsch-Man’s need for kitsch, as does Hermann Broch).</p>
<p>Kitsch - that is, the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at our own reflection (Kundera).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/todd-napolitano">todd napolitano</a>, <a href="/tags/napolitano">napolitano</a>, <a href="/tags/diane-patterson">diane patterson</a>, <a href="/tags/kundera">kundera</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/wilde">wilde</a>, <a href="/tags/women">women</a>, <a href="/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="/tags/kitsch">kitsch</a>, <a href="/tags/marcuse">marcuse</a>, <a href="/tags/sage-lunsford">Sage Lunsford</a>, <a href="/tags/hermann-broch">hermann broch</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator787 at http://electronicbookreview.comThe Medial Turnhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/machinic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Tabbi</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Following such foundational studies as Robert Nadeau’s <span class="booktitle">Readings from the New Book on Nature</span> (1981), N. Katherine Hayles’s <span class="booktitle">The Cosmic Web</span> (1984), David Porush’s <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine</span> (1985), and Tom LeClair’s <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess</span> (1989), Strehle and Johnston continue to work with a remarkably stable canon whose authors have “turned to modern science and technology for alternative concepts of narrative necessity and thematic organization” (Johnston 64). In the distributed network of alternatives that these mainstream studies have created, Pynchon occupies the shifting center, Barth and Coover persist in the academic margins, Gaddis and McElroy stand in perennial need of recognition by the corporate culture they deconstruct, while DeLillo and, perhaps, Burroughs and Barthelme, are located at the popular front of late-capitalist culture wars whose logical outcome is cyberpunk. With Donna Haraway, Atwood and Cadigan complicate the gender imbalance by imagining the machine as “an aspect of our embodiment” co-extensive with “us, our processes” (Haraway, cited in Johnston 257). One can expect, as a consequence of the widening circulation of theoretical perspectives around this core group of novelists, that critics after Strehle and Johnston will go on to map further cultural migrations of literature into science and technology, not only in such evident heirs to Pynchon as Vollmann, Wallace, and Powers, but also in narratives further afield that, with no obvious thematic reference to science, nonetheless illustrate its rippling cultural effects. Moreover, as books themselves become transformed by developments in electronic textuality, we can expect future critics to acknowledge, more fully than does either of these very linear treatments of very nonlinear novels, the implications of a self-conscious, networked aesthetic for the practice of critical writing.</p>
<p>If, after twenty years of formalized science-and-literature studies, critics in North America have remained partial to a set of major texts, the cause may be in part a tendency, understandable in excursions into the unmapped territory between disciplines, to let the borrowed disciplinary structures and terminology serve a normative function. Strehle, for example, arranges counterintuitive elements from the new physics alongside their experimental analogues in fiction, in order to distinguish the offbeat realism of her chosen writers from “the intentionally aesthetic narratives of metafiction.” She takes special care early in her study to restrict the term <span class="lightEmphasis">metafictionist</span> to such “educated offspring of modernist parents” as Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick, and Raymond Federman (4). By the same token, “neorealism” doesn’t quite cover the “worldly” fiction that qualifies for inclusion, and “self-reflexivity” (a term whose early rejection, but increasingly central role, in the development of cybernetics, Strehle overlooks) is treated as one technique among many, lest reality should become mired in subjectivity and replaced “with an orderly self-reflexive word-world” (18). Deriving a literary principle from the idea of complementarity in physics, Strehle sees her chosen writers as affirming ” <span class="lightEmphasis">both</span> art…and the real world.” Her term for such affirmative fiction, “actualism,” is taken from Werner Heisenberg’s distinction “between the actual and the real,” where the actual is defined as an active and dynamic process at the subatomic level that can only be observed indirectly (7).</p>
<p>Rejecting the binary logic of representation articulated by Ortega y Gasset, by which authors “direct readers to observe either the garden outside the window or the glass through which the garden appears” (1), Strehle seeks through actualism a middle way (akin to the “mid-fiction” analyzed in Alan Wilde’s <span class="booktitle">Middle Grounds</span> [1987]). Unfortunately, in allowing physics to set both the terms and much of the content of her discussion, Strehle tends to lose sight of the specifically literary qualities of her subject. Instead of seeking those points where metafiction’s concern with the problem of “the outside of the text” might converge with scientific conceptions of observation, autopoiesis, and self-reference, Strehle discards the literary terms (and, with them, a set of writers and techniques whose alternative explorations might have added to her repertoire of possible engagements with the real). Thus the direct visual experiments with typography on the page-field, which one finds in Sukenick, Federman, Kathy Acker, and William Gass, have yet to be systematically studied, either in themselves or as literary analogues to the field view of modern science. <cite id="note_a"></cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_a">^1In his 1997 manuscript, “Narrative and Materiality: Rethinking Objectivity in Postmodern Fiction and Theory,” Daniel Punday does consider the visual nature of Sukenick’s and Federman’s narratives, among others. Steve Tomasula’s 1994 review of Federman’s <span class="booktitle">Double or Nothing</span> and <span class="booktitle">Critifiction</span>, written in collaboration with font designer, Steven Farrell, demonstrates one way that a self-conscious criticism might go about transforming its own visual look on the page (<span class="booktitle">Private Arts</span> 8-9 (1994): 416-433).</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_a"></cite> As it is, in the absence of any discussion of the materialities specific to literary texts, the imported terminology tends to be diluted through universal thematic applications.</p>
<p>The radical holding of incompatible concepts together in the mind (as in Bohr’s description of light, for example, as both a particle and a wave, and, in another register, Wittgenstein’s example of a drawing that is both a duck’s head and a rabbit, but never at the same time in the eyes of one observer) reduces to a moderate “position blending some transformed assumptions from realism and antirealism, to create an art about both reality and artistic process.” Because Strehle does not address the material means by which such critical assumptions are to be transformed, however, complementarity comes down to compromise, and the mind’s participation in the observed environment becomes something neutral, an “awareness of interpretation as an interactive process” (6). What is missing from her effort to create a participatory textual reality is any description of the processes of mediation by which the literary mind and its textual embodiments engage with the real. And for this, criticism has little choice but to revisit questions concerning literature’s self-conscious engagement not with abstract “word-worlds” alone, but with the various media, visual as well as aural and verbal, through which narratives are transmitted from authors to readers.</p>
<p>“It is one thing,” Donald Davidson writes in “The Material Mind,” “for developments in one field to effect changes in a related field, and another thing for knowledge gained in one area to constitute knowledge of another” (<span class="booktitle">Essays on Actions and Events</span> [Oxford: Clarendon, 1980] 247). In urging the adoption of actualism as an alternative to the metafictional discourse generated in her home discipline, Strehle would reconstitute literary knowledge as somehow free of the particularities of the literary medium itself. In a survey of the field up to the early nineties, Strehle criticizes her predecessors for allowing physics to disappear “into the background in readings that focus on aesthetic issues (the rhetorical strategies foregrounding the fictionality of texts)” (22). The word <span class="lightEmphasis">actualism</span> itself promises somehow to place us closer than more familiar terms to the unmediated flow of events beneath a multiplicity of incompatible verbal descriptions. Strehle wants to take account of art and language and the interpreter’s awareness of interpretation’s effects, but these things remain separate and separable from the work as a whole. That interpretation itself can proceed only through the mediation of language, the indirection that constitutes all that is literary about the object of study, Strehle leaves largely unexplored.</p>
<p>Inattention to the necessary mediation of knowledge and particular styles of narrative indirection leads Strehle to systematically exaggerate the formlessness of her texts, those “loose baggy monsters.” Thus, a “quintessential actualistic text” such as <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> (27), by refusing artificial continuities based on Newtonian causality, absolute frames of reference, “materiality, objectivity, and certainty” (24), also rejects “the concept of novelistic economy to become prodigal or wasteful” of its material (225). Similarly, <span class="booktitle">JR</span> “refuses to be a well-made thing” (97), <span class="booktitle">The Public Burning</span> “is long, uneconomical” (73), and “the tension dissipates” in the later sections of <span class="booktitle">Cat’s Eye</span> (167). These novels, and Barth’s <span class="booktitle">LETTERS</span>, “do not ‘come together’ to produce a ‘big picture’ at the end but rather, like Life, fall apart” (226). Compelled by her actualist program to look askance at the real, yet at the same time prevented by her distrust of aestheticism from considering the ways that excess surface details are constituted by processes of textual mediation, Strehle is unable to read such novels as anything other than instances of a universal narrative of entropic dissolution. Their various presentations, not of the real directly, but of what Johnston would term its “media effects,” are left out of the picture.</p>
<p>For Johnston, such media effects are ultimately indeterminate (even “delirious” in their psychological manifestations), but nonetheless manage to generate expansive literary “assemblages,” a “continuous proliferation of interfaces” between scientific, historical, mythical, and literary systems, whose composite structure is anything but loose (83). Strehle’s point of reference is quantum physics, Johnston’s is media-discourse studies and information theory. The implied literary trajectory roughly follows a conceptual trend in postwar sciences, described by John von Neumann in 1949 as a “turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control” (cited in Johnston 61). As the focus of attention has shifted from the microscale of physical reality to the macroscale of social communication, from metaphorical reflections on the nature of matter and energy to the virtual reality of disembodied information, the terms of reference have expanded to include the full range of cultural activity. Authoritative citations of Bohr and Heisenberg, which in Strehle give an extraliterary grounding to meditations on textual indeterminacy, become less and less frequent as U.S. and Canadian critics have embraced continental theorists such as Baudrillard, Deleuze, Kittler, and Virilio, who inhabit the modern scientist’s world of statistical probability and create discursive styles appropriate to it (without always adhering to the empirical constraints and contextual limits observed in the sciences). <cite id="note_b"></cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_b">^2What looks like “fashionable nonsense” to empirical scientists such as Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, a mis-translation between two very different languages and confusion between global and atomistic levels, is rightly taken for progress in literary understanding. Whether or not Johnston’s method of narrative multiplication turns out to be a responsible way of approaching the natural world (and much new work, especially in the cognitive sciences, takes account of narrative theories), the rapid expansion of critical contexts has undeniably complicated our understanding of the materialities of contemporary American fiction.</cite></p>
<p>The best illustration of Johnston’s concept of a media assemblage is the book’s cover art, by Gregory Rukavina, titled (<span class="booktitle">Mr. Memory: The 39 Steps</span>) - a collage of (presumably) 39 gray rectangles of various sizes arranged in several planes on which letters and numbers have been projected as if through a camera lens. The media effects are thus distributed over a non-continuous surface, and any illusion of depth is created by the arrangement of the surfaces, their manner of overlapping and the gaps between them. The letters and numbers do not spell out or add up to anything; rather, they remain in their literal materiality, resisting interpretation (unless one goes outside the system of literal projection and relates the whole to the Hitchcock film alluded to in Rukavina’s title). By contrast, Strehle’s cover illustration, by Molly Renda, features three rectangles of the same size connected along a single vertical, so that the middle rectangle suggests a page turning in a book. The three figures are set against a speckled black background. This underlying plane alters the coloration and geometric details sketched on the “pages,” but it remains separate and formless, an indistinct “reality” affecting, but largely unaffected by, the pages through which it is viewed.</p>
<p>More consistently than Strehle and perhaps any other U.S. critic, Johnston has brought the range of poststructuralist theory to bear on American fiction’s most discussed experimental texts. Specifically, <span class="booktitle">Information Multiplicity</span> takes its key terms, “assemblages,” “multiplicity,” and “machinic phylum,” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; also important are the “discourse networks” or “writing-down systems” (<span class="foreignWord">Aufschreibsysteme</span>) from Friedrich Kittler, <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/future-anterior">Kittler is reviewed by Bruce Clarke concurrently with the present review</a> who decisively generalizes the notion of medium, applying it to all domains of cultural exchange in the social environment no less than in processes of psychological individuation. Like the works by Kittler and Deleuze dealing specifically with literary texts, Johnston’s criticism is valuable not for offering new interpretations (readers will find little here that is not already implied in Johnston’s precursors). Instead, it resituates the critical discussion by drawing attention to the impact of media themselves, that is, the interdiscursive networks that link writers, archivists, addresses, and interpreters. Where Strehle adopts the word “actualism” to designate the space between text and world where meaning is generated, Johnston uses the term “mediality” to indicate the ways in which a literary text inscribes in its own language the effects produced by other, nonliterary, media. Johnston’s critical mission is to ascertain how these media effects - our culture’s technological unconscious - are narrativized or how they can be seen to condition conscious awareness as a “reading effect.”</p>
<p>Johnston’s narrative, like Strehle’s, is decidedly entropic, but it does not lead (as does Strehle’s) to a conception of the real and its textual constructions as shapeless and random. Moreover, because it is situated in specific technological transformations rather then in a generalized epistemological shift, the narrative describes historical changes among novelists and from one work to another, which get elided on Strehle’s actualistic template. Indeed, where Strehle (like many critics trained in the sixties) finds non-hierarchical and non-linear structures liberating, Johnston knows that such flexible structures largely redefine power in “the military-industrial complex born from World War II” (63). Specifically, Johnston’s master narrative works in three stages, proceeding from: 1) a time of separate and separable media (registered in such works as <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow, Lookout Cartridge</span>, and <span class="booktitle">JR</span>); to 2) “a condition of partially connected media systems” in DeLillo’s later novels and Pynchon’s <span class="booktitle">Vineland</span> (where differences in media, as in the transition from filmic to digital registrations, still offer spaces of resistance to newly aggregated structures of corporate power); to 3) the prospect, in cyberpunk fiction, of media’s “disappearance” into “a totalized, global information economy” in which “cyborg culture becomes the only culture” (233-34).</p>
<p>Wittgenstein claimed, in the 1922 preface to the <span class="booktitle">Tractatus</span>, that he had put to rest philosophy’s open problems. Yet his point was that total connectivity in philosophical understanding would change nothing in the world; only our perception of the relations among its elements would change. Something similar would seem to be true of the cultural implosion of distinct media into a single medium in which, for the first time in history or for the end of history (as Kittler has said), sound, visuals, and text exist on the same digital platform. Referring to the mental state of William Gibson’s protagonist at the climax in <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span>, Johnston writes: “To Case’s relief and amazement, the fusion of the two AIs appears to change very little, at least from the human perspective, since what this fusion brings about is the AIs’ transcendence of human affairs altogether” (245). The newly homogenized technopolitical world order helps to explain the return to stylized, but “rather conventional orderings” in much cyberpunk fiction (Johnston 6; Andrew Ross makes a similar observation in <span class="booktitle">Strange Weather</span> [1991]). “In certain respects,” writes Johnston, the machinic phylum “has evolved into a zone much like the street” (246).</p>
<p>What changes, then, is not the known environment but our mental creation of its elements - and its reciprocal creation, in us, of a mixture of (not exclusively literary) “reading effects.” More than an index of cultural entropy, the external media environment becomes, at least implicitly in Johnston, a cognitive map of a new form of subjectivity, one that is “displaced and redistributed throughout the entire machinic activity that writing and reading these novels entails” (5). This new subjectivity, “a contemporary version of what Freud called the ‘psychic apparatus’ ” (14), emerges specifically from new ways of textualizing memory and perception. And just as Freud’s contemporaries found it useful to redefine consciousness in relation to the emergent medium of their time, cinema, contemporary subjectivity finds theoretical elaboration (in Lacan’s symbolic order, Deleuze’s “machinic phylum,” and Kittler’s “discourse networks”) as “an interiorized reflection of the current standards of all technical media” (33). Multiplicity is essential, for it is in the gaps among media and, more specifically, in the gaps between the reader and the media effects registered by the novel, that such fiction models the dynamics of a psychic apparatus (33, 51).</p>
<p>As the return to conventional form in cyberpunk reveals, however, literary narrative remains hard pressed to keep up with the expansive orderings of contemporary media. For all the newly decentered environmental webwork, narrative, as Johnston realizes, must be “anchored to a perspective and thus to a center of intentionality.” Sophisticated prose fictional narratives, such as <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>, counter the digitalization of information “by transposing its history into a continuous but indeterminate stream of delirious media effects.” Thus Pynchon’s novel “mimics film, radio, dance hall music, drug-induced hallucinations, and seances in which the dead speak” (63). In <span class="booktitle">JR</span>, as in Raymond Williams’s conception of televisual “flow,” the center of intentionality need only be transferred from the level of narrative content to that of corporate organization. Once we consider programming rather than programs, corporate agents rather than human agencies, “interruption is transformed into something like its opposite, continuity,” and the result is a trans-personal - though, again, ultimately delirious - intentionality (125). Such insights are unavailable to Strehle, although they have been worked out elsewhere in Pynchon and Gaddis criticism. <cite id="note_c"></cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_c">^3Piotr Siemion looks at the transformation of human into corporate agency in “Whale Songs: The American Mega-Novel and the Age of Bureaucratic Domination” (diss. 1994. Columbia). I consider Williams’s conception of “flow” in “The Technology of Quotation: William Gaddis’s <span class="booktitle">JR</span> and Contemporary Media” (<span class="booktitle">Mosaic</span> 28.4 [1995]): 150-51.</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_c"></cite> Yet, where Strehle narrates a universal dissolution of narrative energies, Johnston’s finely tooled machinic assemblage repeatedly threatens to go out of control. It is unclear, given his wholly machinic view of human consciousness, whether his framework can allow for the emergence of any mind that is not delirious - that is, not riddled by anxiety at its own groundlessness.</p>
<p>Another way of looking at delirium might begin with the word’s etymology - from the Latin, <span class="foreignWord">de lira</span>, meaning “out of the furrow.” The word delirium can then refer, as the novelist and art critic William S. Wilson has pointed out, to a faulty plowing in which the plow pulls out of the furrow. Equally, in a literary context, where rational thought proceeds in a line furrowed with opposites, to be delirious can mean to go outside oppositional thinking. A plow pulls out of the furrow, where rooted plants are meant to grow in straight lines. That’s one way of transitioning from striated to smooth space, in Deleuze’s vocabulary. Outside ond over the furrow, untended vegetation is likely to be rhizomatic. And so is narrative when it resists the linearity of sentences on a page and tries to get outside the furrowed oppositions and rootedness of rational thought. <cite id="note_d"></cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_d">^4 Wilson, in a series of letter-essays to various correspondents that is itself an example of rhizomatic communication, has applied this concept of delirium as a kind of plowing to the scene in <span class="booktitle">Lot 49</span> where Oedipa encounters the aged sailor: “Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered?” “The sailor plows,” Wilson writes, “but at diagonal angles to the furrows of official citizenry. Oedipa realizes the need to be out of the furrow, which is out of opposites, and out of opposition: ‘Öand if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia’ (<span class="booktitle">Lot 49</span> 182). Setting aside the tiresome use of ‘paranoia,’ ‘unfurrowed’ is out of the opposites, in what must seem a delirium. Pynchon places Oedipa between opposites: on one hand, experience furrowed by opposites that can’t be reconciled; and on the other hand, experience beyond opposites, out of the groove: ‘Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of yearsÖ.’” (Undated letter to Marjorie Welish, forwarded as an enclosure to Daniel Wenk, May 1998)</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_d"></cite> Rhizomatic thought, like rhizomatic narrative, needs no ground or foundation; rather, it finds support horizontally, through a process of expanding connections, and thus creates a foundation as it goes, in what Joseph McElroy (in a narrative vein very much in tune with Deleuze) would term a “collaborative network” or, more simply, “Field.”</p>
<p>In a chapter on McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span>, which differs from comparable meganovels in being restricted to the first-person viewpoint of a single narrator, Johnston again formulates Field as a “novelistic dilemma: how can a narrative cause information to proliferate from varied perspectives and thus sketch a collaborative network, all the while remaining attached to the consciousness or point of view of a single individual subject?” (98-99). A number of potential answers may be found in the ensemble of theories and perspectives currently gathered under the heading of “cognitive science,” which Johnston references in an early footnote to Martin Gardner’s <span class="booktitle">Mind’s New Science</span> and in a more extended reference to Daniel Dennett’s concept of consciousness as a revisionary process involving “multiple drafts” (104-05). Indeed, although Johnston doesn’t say so explicitly, his narrative center and source of continuity, which the novelist must construct among “partially connected media systems,” functions very much like the conscious mind as currently understood - responding to gaps in awareness and incommensurable representations by creatively linking them into a workable mental image or patchwork representation. Although Johnston does not make the attempt, a more direct and sustained translation between mental and media ecologies would no doubt expand our understanding of the particular constraints relevant to contemporary aesthetic experience.</p>
<p>For opening this line of inquiry (in a chapter that succeeds at last in bringing into focus both the nature of McElroy’s so-called “difficulty” and his unique importance), and for more generally linking questions of literary self-consciousness to self-reflexive systems in the larger media environment, Johnston’s book deserves the widest possible readership, among literary theorists and practical critics alike. One must wonder, though, whether the implications of Johnston’s argument have not already changed the climate in which such a reception has been possible. The energies unleashed by modern physics, media theory, and cognitive science have migrated in ways that neither of these two books anticipates. As Strehle has produced no successor in the systematic application of models from quantum physics, neither will Johnston. The linear explication of a fractalizing discourse needs to be done only once. Responsibly raising the standard of contemporary criticism of fiction, Johnston has made graduate seminars in Pynchon, Gaddis, McElroy, and the like a possibility for perhaps another decade. But given new curricular demands for attending to the popular culture produced by the very corporate media whose “effects” these novelists recreate, it is doubtful that students will have time to go on reading these novelists as a group or even their individual works in their entirety.</p>
<p>Surely it is time that criticism come to terms with the fact that contemporary media of reception have doomed their most complex and accurate chronicles to the status of unread classics. If these word-happy novels came into prominence at a time when critical thought was completing a “linguistic turn,” in Richard Rorty’s phrase, they enter obsolescence at a moment that might now be characterized as a “medial turn” - a cultural transformation these books anticipate and urge on in their thoroughgoing articulation (in writing) of non-literary media effects. The book itself will not be unchanged by these media transformations, and critical practice will also require appropriate adjustments. Instead of continuing to produce interpretations and close readings as a way of making such work available for students in an academic setting, future criticism will no doubt engage textual fragmentation on its own terms, whether through hypertextual means or through some other method of mosaic or collage. Criticism, in short, needs to migrate into other, non-literary media. Once there, it may be in a better position to identify unexpected contributions to a remarkable, but distinctly historical, moment when literary narrative and its supporting networks exerted a discernable pull against corporate media.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This essay appears in the Spring-Fall 1998 issue of <span class="booktitle">Pynchon Notes</span>.</p>
<h2>notes</h2>
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